Speed Up Your Design With Shortcuts

I remember being in my first Photoshop class and learning about shortcuts to increase our productivity.  Everyone always says they’re faster, but I thought I’d do a rough experiment to see how much faster.  I cruised on over to psdtuts and found a fun little tutorial to use.  The setup for the test was that the “d” would be with shortcuts, and the “t” without. Anything that can be accomplished with the mouse alone I considered a non-shortcut.

The image above is the result and here are the numbers:

• “d” (w/shortcuts) took 10 minutes 42 seconds
• “t” (wo/shortcuts) took 13 minutes 3 seconds
• with shortcuts was 2 minutes 21 seconds quicker
• 18% increase in productivity

I don’t know every shortcut that exists, but I’d say that’s still pretty good.  You can see all the default shortcuts in Photoshop by navigating to  Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts.